'Shark Tank' star Mark Cuban is on the lookout for a crypto app with the potential to become as wildly popular as Instagram

• Billionaire investor Mark Cuban said he's looking to invest in a crypto app with mass appeal.
• "We haven't gotten that first viral, mainstream, crypto-based application," he told Crypto Banter in an interview.

Billionaire Mark Cuban is on the hunt for a crypto app to invest in — one that shows some promise of becoming a much-used part of mainstream daily life like Instagram.

"All the blockchains are kind of in a death war, trying to get users and applications," he told Crypto Banter in an interview released Saturday.

The "Shark Tank" investor noted that popular image-based social media platform Instagram, now owned by Facebook parent Meta, took some time to gain traction after initially getting a lukewarm response.

"Then everybody got it, it went viral," he said. "We haven't gotten that first viral, mainstream, crypto-based application. We will. That's what I'm looking for in terms of investments."

He said he's looking for an app that, when spotted by a passerby on a Miami street, would get the comment: "Oh yeah, I use that!" — just as people would say with Instagram.

Cuban also shared a few details about his crypto portfolio, saying he's heavily invested in ethereum and polygon.

He argued that bitcoin doesn't have a great deal of utility, and reiterated that it's "ridiculous" to think it can be a hedge against inflation under any circumstances.

"You can tell me all you want about El Salvador. But El Salvador has to buy their bitcoin in dollars, just like everybody else, right?" he said. "So there's nothing special there."

Cuban has previously said the idea that bitcoin is an inflation hedge is just a marketing slogan, not only for the leading cryptocurrency, but also for safe-haven gold.

"And so bitcoin's a great store of value, but ethereum and polygon — that I both own a lot of — you can start to see the utility," he added.

Smart contracts — one of the main utility cases for the ethereum blockchain — can help users exchange money or carry out other transactions transparently, without any middlemen. Multiple blockchains are vying for dominance as a home for smart contract protocols.

Meanwhile, polygon is designed to solve scalability and usability issues that exist within the ethereum blockchain. Most NFT projects seem to be using this scaling solution to avoid high transaction fees on ethereum.

"You're starting to see more and more applications off up there," Cuban said. "And we'll see what happens with ETH 2.0 in terms of gas fees, and I think polygon has done a great job, and you got other blockchains trying to do the same thing."

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